Imagine your harddisk is broken some day - and all your data is gone.
All your files, images, documents etc....and statistically every harddisk fails some day. So either you do DVD or tape backups regularly or need to use a system that consists of several harddisk that mirrow each other.

In general there are 3 kinds for that purpose - you could use a RAID controller and have several harddisks in your pc - but this is usually either a bit noisey and uses much electricity (hardware controller for the harddisks) or unreliable and slows downs the system (software controller).

In professional environments there are usually SAN (Storage Area Network) systems for simulatenous and fast access of several people on the same data via fibre channel or a NAS (Network Attached storage) where there is simply some secured set of harddisks in the network that you can access.

Now, the latter solution becomes more and more interesting for home purposes.

Synology already introduced the Cube station a little while ago..which is not noisey and even more then just a NAS - it even downloads files for you or can be used as a small webserver or media server for MP3s or vidoe files.



Synology is now presenting SOHO NAS systems at the CEBIT at the moment.

It lets you use your own harddisks and you can upgrade it with more disks anytime...

It is accessible via SMB and the transfer rates are about 30 MByte/sand per FTP even 45 MByte/s.

You can also use it as an iTunes-Server or a BitTorrent client.

Or you could use your old works SAN array and have 3.2 TB (thats what ive got ill take a pic_